Facebook and Google are ‘rigging’ the Irish abortion referendum

On Tuesday, Facebook started to block adverts relating to the referendum that did not originate from advertisers inside Ireland.

Now, Google says all advertising relating to the referendum vote will be blocked.

These moves have been warmly welcomed by Ireland’s ‘Yes’ to abortion campaign. That tells us all we need to know as to why it has happened.

The censorship by Google and Facebook is a blow to the ‘No’ to abortion campaign. The pro-life campaign had planned an intensification of an existing online advertising presence in the closing weeks of the campaign before polling day on May 25th.

So Ireland’s beleaguered pro-lifers look with dismay at Google’s decision.

The irony is that Google’s decision – which takes the unprecedented step of banning all advertisements, including those from Irish citizens and campaigns – amounts to what they claim they are trying to prevent, namely, ‘foreign interference.’

They are depriving the campaign to save the 8th Amendment – the Irish Constitution’s guarantee of ‘the right to life of the unborn’ – of one of its most important platforms.

Not content with having the majority of Ireland’s media advocating, overtly or covertly, for a ‘Yes’ vote, the pro-abortion lobby now wants to shut down online debate.

Not content with having the political establishment firmly on their side, the ‘Yes’ campaign now wishes to use the most totalitarian method available: silence the opposition by preventing pro-life arguments from coming into Ireland.

Of course, there is no talk of blocking the freely available U.S. and British media coverage of the referendum, which has been as equally pro-abortion and one-sided as the mainstream Irish media’s coverage.

The Irish political establishment cannot afford to lose this referendum. Their political masters and funders, not least in the EU and UN, are counting on them. Domestic political careers will end if the referendum is not carried.

The pro-abortion political elite of Ireland is worried. Recent opinion polls on the referendum have been saying the same thing week after week. The pro-abortion campaign is losing ground; the pro-life campaign is gaining ground.

The previously ‘soft’ campaigning of the pro-abortionists, misusing the word ‘compassion’ at every turn, is moving now into negative. Suddenly pictures of babies in the womb are deemed ‘offensive’; pictures of what an abortion looks like in reality are said to be ‘beyond the pale.’

Commentators, who are barely able to disguise their loathing of what they term ‘anti-abortionists,’ are outraged by these photographs. Well, if such images are so horrible to look at – and they are horrible – then maybe what’s shown in them shouldn’t become a legalized daily reality in Ireland.

The reality of those horrific images is exactly what is being voted on.

The way the ‘Yes’ campaign has manipulated the media, one would think the whole referendum is about the ‘right to travel abroad to seek medical treatment.’

It isn’t.

It never was.

The referendum is about the fact that the baby on the poster, the baby in the womb, shares the same humanity as the person looking at him. And, if that is the case, then that child deserves the same protection and rights as anyone else.

With days to go before polling day, expect more dirty tricks from the political elite backing the ‘Yes’ campaign. Remember, this referendum must be won, no matter how many times freedom of speech is overridden, no matter how many future Irish lives are going to be lost through legalized abortion, no matter how many women’s bodies are maimed.

The silencing of the debate just days before voters go to the polls is a sinister move of the lowest sort. The pro-abortion side knows that the truth of abortion is something that no one will ever vote for. Therefore, that truth has to be hidden and, instead, a lie propagated. It is time to unmask that lie and those who orchestrate its propagation.